A girl being ordered around. Told what to do by a voice from up there. Told to get ready, to get naked, to change, to tidy clothes, while still naked under the gaze of over a hundred of impatient eyes. She gets dressed. She starts her dance. Or should I call it a walk?..

This is not a walk in the park. She starts powerful, perfect, inhumanly perfect. Her steps are so precise that you can’t convince yourself that it’s her who is stepping in the beat and not the beat that is produced by her heavy boots. The music (can I call it music?) changes softly, almost unnoticeably, and so do her moves. They follow each other in a perfect – again, too perfect – dance.

But it can’t last forever. There is something inside that does not fit in “keep your arms straight, look forward, feel nothing”. An odd step, a skipped bit and it all starts falling apart. The one falls into the many, the mechanism falls into individualities. Perfection falls into humanhood.

Into dance, protest marches, sex, tiredness, getting up and keeping going. Into everything human life consists of. Including the almost inevitable lack of life in it. Including the ineradicable pursuit to be perfect. To be a machine.

We try to be perfect, most of us. Many of us, anyway. Each on our own tiny individual level. We try to be the best mechanism we can get. We forget who we are.

As a group, we remember who we are and… we try to be perfect. As a species, humans are intellectual bees. The better you do your job, the better it is for the hive. The better it is for the hive, the better it is for you. But to do our job better, we get more and more specialized, to the point that we know everything about nothing, lose the big picture, and with it – the meaning.

There are likely not many things that define humans more than the search of a meaning. Without it, we are machines. Or… beasts? Is there really such a difference? Is there a difference, to follow the commands from inside or from outside? From nature or from other humans? From software or hardware? The better we are together, the less is required from each one of us. The less is there from each one of us. The less it matters if it’s us or someone else.

What is human, again? A social animal? An intellectual animal? A blushing animal? A conscious animal, I would say. An animal that is conscious of itself, including of its animal part. Who stays human when the world demands machines. Who steps out when the army demands a perfect line. Who goes against the army. Against judgement, against a hundred merciless eyes and an hour of merciless beat. Who resists and overcomes. Who makes the overlord stop the applause with, “Thank you, this is enough”. It’s not enough, girl, it’s never enough.